People who participate in a political system will usually find it to their advantage to form alliances. Since the incentive is there, if the formal trappings of political parties are prohibited, this will only result in such alliances existing in informal ways (much like suppressing the market economy results in an underground economy immediately springing up). This is true for all political systems except pure autocracies and perhaps small oligarchies that are tightly-knit enough to operate with general consensus.
The U.S. founders generally had a negative view of political parties and were hoping to design a republican system that wouldn’t have them. (Madison’s Federalist Paper No. 10 is representative of this attitude.) Yet they completely failed, with the first party system appearing almost immediately after the ratification of the Constitution. Considering that the Founders were less delusional and ignorant about government than almost anyone who is studying politics today, and that they had something much closer to the blank slate to work with, their failure should be a convincing demonstration of the impracticability of the idea.
Besides all that, the real problem, of course, is that electoral politics is overall much less relevant than people imagine. Laws are today normally created by unelected professional bureaucracies and (to a lesser degree) judicial precedents, with legislatures providing only vague suggestions. The notions of “rulemaking” and “Chevron deference” are probably not discussed in the civics textbooks, but they are far more relevant for how government actually works than all the political theater on the TV.
Considering that the Founders were less delusional and ignorant about government than almost anyone who is studying politics today, and that they had something much closer to the blank slate to work with, their failure should be a convincing demonstration of the impracticability of the idea.
This is a common attitude, but I believe it’s completely wrong. It’s the same sort of thinking that leads to people saying that you can’t question Aristotle, or the Bible.
We know a lot more than the founders did, and we can do better.
On the contrary—I see a much more accurate parallel to religious dogma in the unquestioned faith that the modern respectable academic opinion just has to be more accurate and informed than people from the past on all subjects. I agree that this is normally so when it comes to hard sciences and non-ideological subjects in general. However, when it comes to ideologically charged issues, there is no good reason to believe that the modern respectable opinion can’t be spectacularly delusional by all historical standards.
My above assertion about the Founders is not based on some special reverence for them—in fact, they don’t even rank very high on my own list of historical greats of political thought. It’s based on my opinion that the contemporary state of political thought really is delusional to a level barely precedented in human history, so that being much more sane in comparison is not a particularly high bar to clear. (I could discuss the reasons why I think so, but I’m afraid that would probably be too much of an off-topic diversion.)
People who participate in a political system will usually find it to their advantage to form alliances. Since the incentive is there, if the formal trappings of political parties are prohibited, this will only result in such alliances existing in informal ways (much like suppressing the market economy results in an underground economy immediately springing up). This is true for all political systems except pure autocracies and perhaps small oligarchies that are tightly-knit enough to operate with general consensus.
The U.S. founders generally had a negative view of political parties and were hoping to design a republican system that wouldn’t have them. (Madison’s Federalist Paper No. 10 is representative of this attitude.) Yet they completely failed, with the first party system appearing almost immediately after the ratification of the Constitution. Considering that the Founders were less delusional and ignorant about government than almost anyone who is studying politics today, and that they had something much closer to the blank slate to work with, their failure should be a convincing demonstration of the impracticability of the idea.
Besides all that, the real problem, of course, is that electoral politics is overall much less relevant than people imagine. Laws are today normally created by unelected professional bureaucracies and (to a lesser degree) judicial precedents, with legislatures providing only vague suggestions. The notions of “rulemaking” and “Chevron deference” are probably not discussed in the civics textbooks, but they are far more relevant for how government actually works than all the political theater on the TV.
This is a common attitude, but I believe it’s completely wrong. It’s the same sort of thinking that leads to people saying that you can’t question Aristotle, or the Bible.
We know a lot more than the founders did, and we can do better.
On the contrary—I see a much more accurate parallel to religious dogma in the unquestioned faith that the modern respectable academic opinion just has to be more accurate and informed than people from the past on all subjects. I agree that this is normally so when it comes to hard sciences and non-ideological subjects in general. However, when it comes to ideologically charged issues, there is no good reason to believe that the modern respectable opinion can’t be spectacularly delusional by all historical standards.
My above assertion about the Founders is not based on some special reverence for them—in fact, they don’t even rank very high on my own list of historical greats of political thought. It’s based on my opinion that the contemporary state of political thought really is delusional to a level barely precedented in human history, so that being much more sane in comparison is not a particularly high bar to clear. (I could discuss the reasons why I think so, but I’m afraid that would probably be too much of an off-topic diversion.)